Seventh grader Zachary Bowlin received a 10-day suspension from Edgewood Middle School after he liked a photo of an airsoft gun on Instagram. The caption of the photo simply said, “Ready.”

“I don’t think I did anything wrong,” Zachary said. “[The] next morning, they called me down and, like, patted me down and checked me for weapons. Then, they told me I was getting expelled or suspended or whatever.”

The note the school sent home to Zachary’s parents said that the official cause of his suspension was “liking a post on social media that indicated potential school violence.”

Zachary’s father wasn’t amused.

“I was livid,” said Martin Bowlin, adding “He never shared, he never commented, never made a threatening post … [he] just liked it.”

Another boy, a kindergartner in Massachusetts, was given detention for bringing a similarly miniature Lego gun on a school bus.

A 9-year-old threatened with suspension and forced to fill out statements because of a two-inch Lego gun he was playing with in the school cafeteria.

A 5-year-old girl was suspended for 10 days (eventually reduced to two) and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation after saying “I’m going to shoot you and I will shoot myself.” The weapon in question? A Hello Kitty Bubble Gun.

In Zachary’s case, the suspension was lifted after speaking with his parents.

But the superintendent of Edgewood City Schools added, “I assure you that any social media threat will be taken serious, including those who ‘like’ the post when it potentially endangers the health and safety of students or adversely affects the educational process.”

How does a picture of an airsoft gun ‘endanger’ the safety of students? Do images of World War I or II in their textbooks endanger them? What about muskets during the Revolutionary War? Are those images violent and dangerous?

When the educators have less common sense than the young students they teach, then you know our school systems are in serious peril.

Are you appalled by this student being suspended? Or was it deserved? Share your thoughts below.

About the AuthorRusty Weiss

Rusty Weiss is a freelance journalist focusing on the conservative movement and its political agenda. He has been writing conservatively charged articles for several years in the upstate New York area, and his writings have appeared in the Daily Caller, American Thinker, FoxNews.com, Big Government, the Times Union, and the Troy Record. He is also Editor of one of the top conservative blogs of 2012, the Mental Recession.